HOW THE DEMOCRATS SHOULD FIGHT BACK ON CRIME

 

After saying on the campaign trail that he would lower inflation, President Donald Trump's tariffs have caused prices to increase.  After promising not to cut Medicaid, he recently signed a spending bill that did just that.  The Russian invasion of the Ukraine, which he claimed he could end in one day, is still ongoing, and a recent meeting between him and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, in which Trump literally rolled out the red carpet for the man that the International Criminal Court considers a war criminal,  ended with Putin conceding nothing while Trump, as usual, fawned over him pathetically.

Clearly, Trump is failing at all of these things.  But one thing he is good at is finding something to distract the media from his failures.  About two weeks ago, after lying about violent crime rates in our nation's capitol, he sent both FBI agents and the national guard to patrol the streets of Washington DC.,  despite no law officer or political leader there saying that they were needed.  Trump has also threatened to send troops to other cities  like Chicago while continuing to spread lies about violent crime rates.  In one truly odd moment, he claimed that “The people in Chicago, are screaming for us to come now...African American ladies, beautiful ladies are saying, ‘Please, President Trump, come to Chicago, please.’  I did great with the Black vote, as you know. They want something to happen."  (For the record, Trump got only 15% of the Black vote in 2024 overall, and only about 7% of the Black female vote).

Along with distracting the media and letting Trump look tough without actually accomplishing anything (the national guard troops are mostly just standing around in low crime areas), bringing up the issue of crime lets Trump turn to a subject that voters have mostly favored Republicans on for years.  This is despite the fact that, except for a spike during the pandemic, violent crime has been on a downward slope for decades in this country.  Sadly, that message hasn't gotten through to the public; in a 2024 Gallup poll, 64% of Americans thought that crime in the country was increasing, even as crime numbers shrank to per covid levels.  The tricky thing is that telling people that their fears are unfounded by the facts doesn't seem to work, especially when those fears are stoked by local news broadcasts featuring crime stories non stop and right wing politicians pushing the idea that cities with Democratic mayors are awash with crime.

But I think the Democrats should fire back on this issue, and Trump's actions  have left him open to an attack on his tough on crime credentials.  I'm talking about his pardoning of over 1500 January 6th protestors, some of whom, despite his claim to support the police, violently attacked capitol police officers. A December 2024 YouGov survey showed that over 60% of voters opposed his pardoning them, so already most of the public think that that was wrong.  Things gets worse for Trump when you consider that some of those pardoned protestors have gone on to commit more crimes after being released.  I really think that the Democrats should make a big issue of this, releasing television ads and giving speeches pointing out that it was a Republican president who let convicts out onto our streets to wreak more havoc.  Make it an issue at every debate until every Trump supporter in the country has to explain why pardoning criminals was a good thing.  And use the names of the criminals to personalize it, like Brent John Holdridge who was arrested for grand theft just last May, or Matthew Huttle who was killed while resisting arrest within days of his release.

As a progressive, I don't like tough on crime rhetoric in general, but using it against the Republican party for defending Trump's pardoning of the January 6th rioters is just fine by me.  That was one pardon Trump should have never made, and I hope it comes back to haunt him in 2026.

THE LAND OF THE MAD KING

 As we all know, when he was just a young spoiled brat, Donald Trump mentored under the infamous lawyer Roy Cohn who taught the three principles that Trump continues to live by: always attack, never admit wrongdoing, and always claim victory, even if defeated.  Now in his second term, Trump has pushed those ideals to the limit.  All his life he has tried to bend reality to his will, now as a president surrounded only by fawning sycophants, he has decided to reject anything that does not promote his belief that he, Donald Trump, is the most flawless human being that has ever lived.

Recently, a jobs report came out that said that job growth in the US  in the past few months had shrunk below expectations, fueled by the economic uncertainty of Trump's on again/off again tariffs.  Refusing to accept the reality of what he had begun, Trump angrily called the numbers "rigged" and fired Erika McEntarfer, the Senate-confirmed Department of Labor official who was in charge of compiling the jobs report.  While many other presidents in the past have groaned about poor economic numbers, Trump is the first to openly say that those numbers, which are carefully compiled, were rigged against him.  Even worse, he has nominated E.J. Antoni as McEntarfer's replacement. Kyle Pomerleau, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, and certainly no liberal, described Antoni by saying “He has either shown a complete misunderstanding of economic data and principles, or he’s showing a willingness to treat his audience with contempt and mislead them.”  But of course, that is exactly what Trump, who has probably seen Antoni on Fox News praising his administration, wants.   Someone who will always tell him what he wants to hear, even if from now on no will be able to trust the economic numbers released during the rest of the Trump presidency.  (Get ready to hear economic claims of "ten million jobs created in a month: or other such rot!)

Trump's departure with reality took another turn a few days later when he decided to have both FBI agents and the national guard begin patrolling the streets of Washington DC because “Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people, and we’re not going to let it happen anymore.” He has decided this despite the fact that violent crime in DC has been dropping precipitously in the past two years as it has across the country.  

His outrageous assertions lead to a press conference in which he openly lied about crime statistics and, of course, named other cities that he felt were also being overrun.  In typical fashion, the cities he listed are all blue cities with African American mayors.  This gets even worse when a simple google search reveals that the cities with the worst violent crime rates in the nation are Memphis, Tennessee and Saint Louis, Missouri, neither of which he mentioned, probably because they're in red states (although they do have Democratic mayors). 

As always, Trump's goal here is to look tough and play to the beliefs of his base that American cities have become crime ridden hell holes, even as violent crime has gone done in this country.  Sending the national guard into the streets of our nation's capitol won't do much to stop crime, but it will make Trump appear  authoritative, and his image is really all that matters to him.  And don't even get me started on how hypocritical this is coming from the man who pardoned around 1,500 criminals who attacked the Washington  DC Capitol building back on  January the 6th in 2020, including many who beat police officers.  

While these two examples of Trump's delusional behavior are bad enough, to me the worst yet was his assertion that "new" evidence involving allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election show that former President Barack Obama was involved in some kind of criminal conspiracy.  While these assertions are patently absurd, Trump has now ordered Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence to begin an investigation of what she called "treasonous behavior".  It's obvious what Trump is doing here: his own base has been turning on him recently over his lack of willingness to release the infamous Jeffrey Epstein files, with former Trump supporter turned rival Elon Musk going so far as to post on X that Trump will never release the files because he's in them.  With most of the public thinking that Trump has something to hide here, pushing for a baseless but distracting investigation of Obama will bring the Obama hating bigots of Trump's base back to his side.  It presents a pathetic full circle for Trump, who began his political career spreading specious lies about Obama's legitimacy as president and is now pushing equally specious charges agains him almost ten years after Obama left office.  Sadly, for Trump, demonizing our first African American president is the gift that keeps on giving.

So here we are America, living in a country led by a vengeful man who lies with nearly every breath and who will accept no fact that doesn't say that he's the best president our country has ever had.  And he still has more than three years to go in his presidency.  Get ready, things could get worse.